Assistant Professor Institute of Health Administration J.Mack Robinson College of Business

Charles Courtemanche

2CI Award: Atlanta Census Research Data Center

Assistant Professor Economics Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

Dr. Courtemanche’s primary field is health economics, though his research also spans topics in public, urban, and labor economics and industrial organization. Dr. Courtemanche’s specific research interests include obesity, public policies to expand insurance coverage, ambulatory surgery centers, big box retailers, and housing market interventions during the Great Depression.

Nancy Forger

2CI Award: Neurogenomics & the Molecular Basis of Behavior

Professor Neuroscience Institute College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Forger’s research is focused around the development of sex differences in the nervous system. Two current projects in the lab examine 1) the role of cell death in the development of neural sex differences and 2) epigenetic contributions to sex differences in the brain. Her research is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Jessica Turner

2CI Award: Neurogenomics & the Molecular Basis of Behavior

Associate Professor Psychology College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Turner comes to GSU from the non-profit research institute, the Mind Research Network, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she was an Associate Professor of Translational Neuroscience and the Director of Operations for their 3T MRI Center. Prior to MRN she was in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine, and the Long Beach VA Medical Center. Dr. Turner’s background is in psychophysics and MRI methodology as applied to a range of clinical populations, with secondary experience in the analysis of genome wide scan (GWS) data, and ontological development. Her research focuses on the intersection of neuroimaging and genetics, particularly genome-wide scan data, and the methods for analyzing these large datasets. Her research program includes the extraction and understanding of multivariate patterns within the combined datasets of neuroimaging and genetics, as applied to clinical populations. The goal is to identify genetic effects on brain structure and function and their role in the development of psychosis. Dr. Turner’s second arm of research focuses on neuroinformatics, the methods for data management, retrieval, and analysis within large neuroscientific studies, particularly on the semantics of the datasets and their representations within logical structures such as ontologies. This includes the development of formal representations of cognitive experiments, the experimental variables involved, and the results of the data for automated data sharing and meta-analysis within neurobiology. At UCI she served as the Project Manager for the Functional Imaging Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN), a multi-site consortium developing methods for distributed fMRI data collection, management and analysis as applied to schizophrenia. She is currently a member of the Neuroimaging Data Sharing Task Force within the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, and the head of the international ENIGMA Schizophrenia Working Group.

William Hopkins

2CI Award: Primate Social Cognition, Evolution and Behavior

Professor Neuroscience Institute College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Hopkins’ main research interest is in the evolution of hemispheric specialization in primates. The research in his laboratory has three main areas of focus: the documentation of functional asymmetries in non-human primates, notably chimpanzees and other great apes including bonobos, gorillas and orangutans; the gestural communication in chimpanzees, particularly with reference to the intentional and referential use of these signaling systems; assess neuroanatomical asymmetries in non-human primates including monkeys and apes.

Nadia Latif

2CI Award: Transcultural Conflict & Violence Studies

Assistant Professor Religious Studies College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Latif’s research interests include new media technology and the mediation of experience; human rights, humanitarian assistance, and forced displacement; gender and the lived experience of violence; revolutionary struggles in the modern Middle East; the history of anthropological theory; postcolonial thought; and Marxist literary criticism.

Jeong-ha (Cath) Oh

Dr. Oh received her Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington in Seattle. Before joining the Department of Computer Information Systems at the Robinson College of Business, she was a post-doctoral research associate at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas.Dr. Oh’s current research focuses on healthcare analytics. Specifically, her work involves developing risk propensity models for predicting patient readmissions related to congestive heart failure. Her other research topics include online social networks analysis, information cascade, and content diffusion in social media.

Hang Shi

2CI Award: Exploring & Testing Strategies for Obesity Reversal

Associate Professor Biology College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Shi’s professional interests include molecular and cellular mechanisms of obesity and diabetes, and the regulation of macrophage inflammation in obesity and diabetes.

Bingzhong Xue

2CI Award: Exploring & Testing Strategies for Obesity Reversal

Associate Professor Biology College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Xue’s research interests include Brown adipocyte thermogenesis and induction of brown adipocytes in white fat depots; epigenetic regulation of energy homeostasis and food intake through hypothalamic neuronal network; and epigenetic regulation of macrophage polarization and function in obesity and diabetes.

Sebastian Lepine

2CI Award: Stellar Astrophysics & Astroinformatics

Associate Professor Physics & Anatomy College of Arts & Sciences

Dr. Sebastien Lepine studies and maps out the stars located within about 300 light-years of the Sun, part of our local Galactic neighborhood. He has discovered thousands of previously unknown nearby star systems, many of which are now prime targets in the search for extra-solar planets. His interests include astronomical data-mining, and the handling of large datasets, catalogs, and archives. Dr. Lepine has also conducted intensive astronomical work in stellar spectroscopy, spending over 300 nights observing thousands of stars with several large telescopes located in Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Chile. He is notably an expert in the spectral classification and analysis of the M dwarfs (or red dwarfs), the smallest and most common type of star in the Galaxy. His research goals are to build the most detailed and complete 3D maps with millions of local stars, and track down the individual motions of those stars through space to understand the dynamical structure and formation history of our Galaxy. Dr. Lepine earned his Ph.D. from University of Montreal, before working as a research scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and then at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he was also an astronomy educator and consultant for the Hayden Planetarium space shows. Dr. Lepine’s research has been funded over the years through several grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Rafal Angryk

2CI Award: Stellar Astrophysics & Astroinformatics

Associate Professor Computer Science College of Arts & Sciences

Before joining Georgia State University, Dr. Angryk served as an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Montana State University (MSU). He was also the founding director of MSU’s Data Mining Laboratory, and holds the title of Affiliate Professor of Physics at MSU due to the interdisciplinary research he is conducting on massive repositories of solar data. Dr. Angryk’s research and teaching interests lie in the areas of Very Large Databases (Spatial and Spatio-temporal Databases, and kNN Indexing of High Dimensional Data), Data Mining (Frequent Patterns Discovery, Clustering and Classification of real-life large-scale data), and Information Retrieval (Text and Image data). He has published over 60 journal articles, book chapters and peer-reviewed conference papers in these areas. His research has been sponsored by the federal agencies: NASA (major contributor), NSF, NGA, and industry: Intergraph Corporation, RightNow Technologies (now Oracle). Dr. Angryk’s interdisciplinary research group at MSU, the Data Mining Laboratory, had 3 professors, 2 post-doctoral researchers, and 14 graduate students. It has been the largest research lab in the Computer Science Department at Montana State University. Since 2006, Dr. Angryk has served as the Ph.D. program coordinator in the Computer Science Department and during that period the program has almost tripled in size and significantly improved its graduation rates. Dr. Angryk received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in 2004 from Tulane University. He also holds two other master’s degrees; a M.A. in Business Management from the University of Szczecin and a M.Eng. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Szczecin.

Anthony Lemieux

2CI Award: Trans-Cultural Conflict & Violence

Associate Professor Communications College of Arts & Sciences

Anthony (Tony) F. Lemieux, Ph.D. serves as a lead researcher in the newly established interdisciplinary Second Century Initiative on trans-cultural conflict and violence. He is also an investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland. In addition, he is affiliated with School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics, Emory University and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University and an affiliate of the Emory Neuropolicy Center. He has an active record of research relating to public health (with a focus on adolescent health behavior, including HIV prevention and intervention). His current experimental research is supported by START, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Previous research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, and Concerned Citizens for Humanity. Dr. Lemieux has lectured at a wide range of academic institutions, as well as the United Nations headquarters in New York, the headquarters of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, and the National Counterterrorism Center / Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Lemieux’s extensive record of peer reviewed publications include articles in Critical Terrorism Studies, AIDS & Behavior, the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, the Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, and Health Psychology. Dr. Lemieux has taught extensively on terrorism and has served as a subject matter expert on radicalization, behavioral screening technologies, and innovative survey methods. Prior to moving to Atlanta, Dr. Lemieux was an Associate Professor of Psychology at Purchase College, State University of New York where he chaired the University’s Strategic Planning Committee. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology at the University of Connecticut, and his B.A. in Psychology and Sociology at Boston College.

Lee R. Mobley

Dr. Mobley graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a PhD in Economics in 1990, and also earned a MFA from UC Santa Barbara in Sculpture. Her undergraduate work was at the University of Georgia, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude, and was inducted into the Golden Key honor society, Phi Beta Kappa. She has more than 20 years of experience in conducting health market and health outcomes studies using advanced statistical and spatial analytic methods. Her research includes analyses of disparities among populations and across geography; examining socio-ecological problems where place and space are important; studies in spatial demography; and analysis of health care markets and behaviors of both consumers and providers. Her publications have included hospital antitrust studies, studies of insurance market competition, market analysis for several Medicare reform initiatives, spatial analysis explaining cardiac risk factors in low income women, analysis of the spatial diffusion of endoscopy services, spatial analysis of access to and quality of preventive care services used by the elderly, and ecological analysis of the spread of HIV among injection drug users in San Francisco. She has earned recognition as an expert in applied spatial analysis, with over 50 peer-reviewed publications, and now serves as the Spatial Data Editor for Spatial Demography. She has expertise doing research inside Federal Research Data Center labs and will lead several projects inside the Atlanta RDC. She has been funded by several large National Institutes of Health grants and Centers for Disease Control projects, and will continue in a leadership role garnering future sponsored research projects with her new team of colleagues and graduate students at Georgia State.

Eric R. Wright

2CI Award: Atlanta Census Research Data Center

Professor Sociology and Public Health

Eric R. Wright is Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Georgia State University and a Second Century Initiative (2CI) Faculty in the Atlanta Census Research Data – Health Policy and Risky Behaviors Cluster. He holds a BA in sociology from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and an MA and PhD in sociology from Indiana University Bloomington. As a medical sociologist, his research interests center on public policy and social responses to health and illness, particularly mental health and illness, substance use, sexual health, and sexually transmitted diseases. Currently, he is involved in several projects exploring the social determinants and responses to prescription drug abuse and efforts to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS and improve the mental and sexual health of adults with serious mental illness. He enjoys working with community organizations and local and state government to better understand community health needs and improve the effectiveness of health-related programs and policies. He is or has been the Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on over $8 million dollars in externally funded research and evaluation projects and has published numerous policy briefs, technical reports, and peer-reviewed scientific papers which have appeared in medical sociology as well as interdisciplinary health, psychiatric, and health policy journals. Professor Wright also is an award winner teacher and deeply committed to involving students in research and service learning projects to make learning more relevant and to build stronger bridges between the academy and the community. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia State University, Dr. Wright was a Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Center for Health Policy in the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).